May 2026: Big Changes with AI Coding on a Budget / Current Workflow

All of the top companies are starting to raise prices, limit access. I kept going back to Claude Code but with cheaper chinese models instead of real Claude, which works okay, but every time they release a new Claude Code, it starts annoying me with something. Last time, even when I ran it with dangerously skip permissions, it just kept asking me permission for every single thing it did. It has done that a few times, so I said screw it, i'll make my own agentic coding tool!

But then I found Oh My Pi - its Pi Mono, the agent used in OpenClaw, but its got all the good stuff you typically want. The developer added a lot of stuff I was thinking about in my head that I would have to implement if i tried to make my own (since I couldn't find anything decent!).

When you install it, it'll pick up information from other coding agents, like api keys, etc, that have already been installed/used, so its very easy to just install and use it.

Its doing a lot of things right, Its just an agent that works, and has an efficient hash based file edit mode that seems to work great and is more efficient (and works with all models).

It has been perfect so far, no complaints with Minimax M2.7, Deepseek v4.

Minimax coding plan or whatever they call it, token plan or w/e, is $10, and its a good model for constant use, its fast, mostly accurate but not always. But since, i've found some more better plans that include it. Opencode Go $5 first month, $10 after - has several models, Qwen3.6 models, Minimax, Deepseek, some other ones. I am about to try it, but seems good - someone complained about a model having only 250k context instead of 1m but mostly people seem happy. You can use it with things without using Opencode at all (Opencode sucks, sorry to say, glitchy mess, i would avoid especially if on a Windows machine)

🚀 Github Copilot won't be so great with the tokens coming next month

Github Copilot, Claude Code, Pi this is the last month (May) to get the crazy lenient usage out of it before they switch it to something much worse. I have no idea how that will work out... but I will find out since I have copilot.

Claude Code + Oh My Pi

Some people seem to think that it is only the model intelligence that matters, and the agent harness / coding tool around the models aren't a big deal. This is sooooo wrong.

I recommend Oh My Pi at this point since Claude Code is trying hard to kick everyone off or annoy them if they aren't using 100% Claude models.

Deepseek v4 Flash and Pro

Right now its crazy discounted/cheap Deepseek v4 and/or Minimax M2.7 via Opencode Go and/or GLM 5.1 (GLM seems to have lots of availability issues...), compared to using Claude Opus 4.5 in some tools like Opencode. Qwen3.5/3.6 are very good as well.

I am only paying 28-40 cents per million tokens if I use the official Deepseek Anthropic-compatible API endpoint with Claude Code.